The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic

came.”

“No, you wore a nightie. Silk, with little pearls. Losi said to me, ‘I hope you don’t think I stole that nightie, ma’am. I swear I didn’t. I didn’t leave it for five minutes, and it was gone and these other clothes were in its place.’ She felt terrible, she knew that nightie was valuable, but the master said it was nothing she did, the clothes must have changed back when he took those spells off you.”

“What does he mean? That my nightgown was really jeans and a T-shirt?” The same jeans and T-shirt that Nora had put on that far-off morning in the mountain cabin, just before she went walking in the woods and met Ilissa.

Mrs. Toristel shrugged. “You look different now than when you came. It’s the same with your clothes, I expect.”

“How do I look different?” Nora asked quickly.

“Well, your hair. It was yellow when you came. Now it’s brown, mostly. Still yellow at the ends.”

Most of Nora’s hair was bound to her head by the bandages on her face. Now she pulled a thick strand loose. The hair fell past her shoulders. “It’s gotten so long,” she said, surprised. “Could I have a mirror? There was one in this room before, where that portrait is now.”

“That portrait? I didn’t take away the mirror,” the other woman said, looking puzzled. “You can’t see much of your face anyway, with all those bandages.”

And under the bandages? “Mrs. Toristel, these cuts, how bad are they?”

“They’re healing nicely,” she said. “And they’ll heal faster if you don’t worry yourself sick about them. Anyway, I thought you’d want to know what happened to your clothes. Losi worked hard to get them clean. They were very dirty,” she said with a sniff, “in addition to all the bloodstains. She mended the rips, too.”

After Mrs. Toristel was gone, Nora spent a long time turning the clothes over in her lap. Yes, Losi had done a good job. Surely no one had ever mended a T-shirt with such care. Nora spread her fingers into a claw and placed her hand over the places that had been torn. Her hand was too small to cover them. There were more of Losi’s neat stitches along the inside seams of the jeans. At some point, someone must have ripped out those seams. Were they too snug to accommodate an expanding belly?

If the magician was right, she had been wearing the same jeans and T-shirt for months. Ilissa had simply recycled them into dozens of delectable, extravagant outfits, one after another.

Or, Nora thought—getting a grip on herself—wasn’t it more logical to assume that she had simply been wearing jeans and a T-shirt when she arrived here, at this place? She’d had an accident on the mountain. Now she was recuperating in a hospital or rehab facility. The man she’d imagined was a magician was really a doctor; Mrs. Toristel was a nurse. Brain damage would explain why she couldn’t read, why she had trouble understanding speech; the whole idea of this foreign language, Ors, might be a self-protective fantasy she’d contrived to shield herself from knowledge of her new limitations.

Why this particular fantasy? Nora wondered. She had never much cared for fiction in the swords and sorcerers vein. When she’d had to read Lord of the Rings for Goldstein’s Modern Myths, she thought it was a bad joke, some of Tolkien’s falsely archaic language was so painful to read. A flash of bittersweet memory: EJ playing Dungeons and Dragons in the den on Saturday nights with his friends, a bunch of guys huddled around the coffee table, utterly absorbed. All geeks—Nora could tell, even at twelve—though some of them were cute and didn’t know it. D&D was the one interest of EJ’s that she couldn’t get. That and physics. Maybe, she thought clinically, her injured brain had hurled her into this magical, medieval-style hallucination as a long-delayed expression of grief for her dead brother. But in that case, wouldn’t she have come across EJ himself by now?

I wish I were in a fantasy with real bathrooms, at least, she thought. Even Ilissa had indoor plumbing.

She looked closely at Mrs. Toristel the next time the older woman came into the room, trying to see the nurse within. It was not easy. Mrs. Toristel was old for a nurse, stiff in the joints, with the kind of yellowish gray hair that meant she’d once been a redhead. As hard as Nora stared, the housekeeper’s ankle-length dress refused to resolve into a nurse’s scrubs. When Nora asked her directly whether this place was really a hospital, the woman looked at her incredulously. “Nothing like that around here. I never heard of such a thing.”

“You’d think they’d be encouraging me to abandon this fantasy, wouldn’t you?” Nora demanded of the girl in the portrait, after the door closed behind Mrs. Toristel. The black-haired girl’s half smile was especially mocking today. “Maybe you’re not real, either,” Nora continued, switching into English. “You don’t look like something that would be hanging in a hospital room. Or maybe you are a mirror, but my mind won’t admit it because I’m afraid to look at my scarred face.”

It was late afternoon, and sunlight streamed through the window’s thick panes, throwing a bath of light on the wall where the portrait hung. And the portrait in turn reflected an oblong of light onto the ceiling.

But the picture was unglazed, Nora noticed; there was no glass in the ornate black frame. She watched the patch of reflected light until the sun moved on and it faded.

When Mrs. Toristel came in that evening, bearing a tray of food, Nora was ready. “Where am I?” she asked. “I mean, what is the name of this place, this area?”

Mrs. Toristel pursed her thin lips as she settled the tray of soup and brown bread on Nora’s lap. It seemed to be a question that she hadn’t considered previously. “When I lived in Pelagnia as a girl, we called this the Northlands,” she said finally. “But that would mean a very large territory, from the sea all the way to the Ice. Right around here, they call this area the Uland, after the river Uel. Most of the master’s lands fall inside the Uland.”

None of these names meant anything to Nora. “What cities are near here?”

That was Red Gate, the market town, Mrs. Toristel said. Three hours away on foot. Barsy, where her daughter lived, and Stone Top, the next market town. “I don’t know what comes after that,” she added. “I haven’t traveled beyond Barsy myself since coming to live here. The king’s seat is at Semr, but that’s a long way away. Several days on horseback.”

“There’s no king,” said Nora. She now felt on solid ground. “There’s no king, I bet there are no towns called Barsy or Stone Top or Red Gate, and I don’t think that man Aruendiel can do magic. This is all bullshit.” Apparently the word for bullshit was a lot worse in Ors than in English, because Mrs. Toristel looked genuinely shocked. But then there was no such language as Ors, Nora reminded herself. “Can’t you just tell me the truth?” she went on. “Where are we? How do I get to I-40 from here? Or Asheville?”

But Mrs. Toristel disclaimed all knowledge of I-40 or Asheville or—upon further questioning—even the United States of America.

“You’re lying or you’re crazy, then,” said Nora. “Or maybe you don’t know anything about geography. Maybe you really believe there’s a king, or that your precious master is a magician. I don’t have to believe it, though.”

“You should calm down.”

“I’m sorry, you’ve been kind to me, and I don’t mean to insult you. But this is all insane.”

Mrs. Toristel said nothing, the wrinkles around her eyes deepening as she looked at Nora.

“I want to go home!” Nora cried out. “Where things are real, where they don’t change. Nightgowns don’t turn into jeans, or—look,” she added, pointing. “That picture on the wall, it’s not a picture. It’s a mirror. I’ll prove it.” Picking up the spoon, she aimed it at the portrait and sent it spinning through the air. There was the sound of breaking glass, and a web of black cracks shot across the girl’s pale, fine-boned face. A triangular shard containing most of the girl’s left shoulder fell to the floor.

“You see?” Nora said triumphantly.

“There was no call to do that,” Mrs. Toristel said. “You’re overexcited. You need some rest. Give me the tray, and you can lie down again.”

“Take it. I don’t want it, anyway.” She gave the tray a great shove just as Mrs. Toristel bent to take it. A second crash, crockery hitting the floor. The front of Mrs. Toristel’s brown dress was several shades darker, soaked with hot soup.

“Oh,” Nora said, frozen with shock, her hand stopped in midair.

“Excuse me,” Mrs. Toristel said through folded lips. She looked down at her stained skirts, then turned and left the room.

Nora looked at the shattered bowl and the puddle of broth on the floor, surprised by her own sudden talent for destruction. Some minutes passed, and Mrs. Toristel did not reappear. Was she burned? With a feeling of guilt,